It is widely known that injection of ANY liquid into the knee joint for instance can have a positive effect on knee pain. If enough marrow can be extracted, then it can simply be filtered and spun down in a centrifuge to concentrate the cells for injection. ) Since we are talking about benign osteoarthritis patients, there is little fear of re-injecting cancer cells. (Early stage solid tumors often have NOT metastasized yet to the marrow at the time of cancer diagnosis. Blood cancers, such as lymphomas, and leukemias, would be most expected to involve the bone marrow. Bone marrow biopsies are routinely done for all kinds of patients suspected of having cancer. In its simplest form, a physician can extract bone marrow cells during an office procedure with a local anesthetic from the iliac crest bone, which is the most superficial portion of the pelvis bones above the area of the hips. I repeat, this is not FDA approved, and we do not do this procedure here at the Scottsdale Joint Center. How is the MSC (stem cell) treatment done for osteoarthritis? Jay had both knees replaced and he is very happy with his knee motion! This is an exciting new field of medicine, but unfortunately, some possibly unethical “physicians” are charging lots of money for a procedure which has little proof that it actually works. One concern of tissue culture might be that a cell could mutate during rapid growth and form another cancer. Cells can be concentrated by filtration and centrifugation, or they can be cultured in a medium rich in nutrients where they can multiply and be injected in higher numbers. Some researchers are extracting MSC’s from fatty tissue removed at the time of a liposuction procedure. The disadvantage is it is possible to re-inject some live cancer cells which could have gotten into the marrow before it was extracted. The advantage of your own cells is less chance of negative tissue reaction. At that point the cells are defrosted and re-injected into the patient. In some cases, the patient’s own marrow cells can be extracted, filtered, frozen and stored, until the patient has completed an aggressive treatment of cancer cells in the body. The mesenchymal stem cells have the ability to repopulate the marrow and regenerate normal blood elements. In this situation a genetic “HLA antigen match” from a donor can be injected into the blood stream of a cancer patient who has had his own bone marrow destroyed by radiation or chemicals. Interestingly, we have been using human stem cells to treat cancer patients for many years in the form of “Bone Marrow Transplants”.

They are usually harvested from the pelvis bones (Iliac Crest) as bone marrow cells. Stem cells exist in our bodies throughout our lifetimes. Stem Cells are drawn from the patients Bone Marrow and re-injected into the joint.

Composure by rexall